


the bridge to nowhere

by inkyreveries



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, this is not a story with a happy ending but it is a hopeful one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 07:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19785970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkyreveries/pseuds/inkyreveries
Summary: Steve doesn’t know why he’s here, but he parks anyways, getting out of his car and walking past polished headstones with fresh flowers laid atop them, walking past bare headstones that look forgotten.He wonders if the headstone he’s walking towards will look forgotten in ten years.He surprises himself by hoping that it doesn’t.





	the bridge to nowhere

**Author's Note:**

> After finishing season 3, I came up with a ton of different ideas for fix-it fics. This isn't one of them. I just needed to grieve for Billy, and I think Steve would need to grieve for him too—and that it might look a lot like survivor's guilt. 
> 
> A million and one thank yous to [ohmybgosh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmybgosh/pseuds/ohmybgosh) for being the most wonderful sounding board and answering all of my agricultural questions!!!
> 
> The title for this fic comes from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJJT00wqlOo) by Sufjan Stevens.

I should have known better;

Nothing can be changed.

The past is still the past,

The bridge to nowhere.

I should have wrote a letter

Explaining what I feel—

That empty feeling. 

-Sufjan Stevens

_July 25 th, 1985_

Steve doesn’t know why he’s here.

The funeral was two weeks ago. He didn’t go. It’s not like he would have been invited, anyway. The kids all went—for Max, mostly.

No one from school came, not even Tommy. Steve doesn’t know why, but when Dustin told him that, something hard and cold twisted in his gut. _I guess people only liked him because they thought he was cool or hot or that he’d beat them up if they didn’t_ , Dustin had said, sounding snide, and then frowned. _But he didn’t have any real friends_. He looked sad.

Steve spent that day sitting by the window, watching droplets of rain fall from the bloated grey sky into the pool where Barb died, trying not to think about what it would feel like to die with holes punched through your chest, trying not to think about what it would feel like to have your last words be “I’m sorry.” 

Steve doesn’t know why he’s here, but he parks anyways, getting out of his car and walking past polished headstones with fresh flowers laid atop them, walking past bare headstones that look forgotten.

He wonders if the headstone he’s walking towards will look forgotten in ten years.

He surprises himself by hoping that it doesn’t.

When he finds the right grave, Steve stares and stares at the headstone—this block of granite, small and grey and dull. He reads the name. He doesn’t want to. He reads it again.

The headstone is fucking bare. And Steve—Steve can’t handle that. 

Steve doesn’t know why he’s here, just that he can’t sleep anymore, can’t close his eyes without seeing black blood, keeps hearing Max sob her brother’s name, a choked “I’m sorry” echoing in his head.

_He didn’t have any real friends._

They weren’t friends—weren’t anything, after that night in October. Steve remembers how, sometimes, he would feel blue eyes burning his skin and refuse to meet them. He remembers how, once, he closed his locker door and blue eyes were _right there_ , how he watched a chapped pink mouth open and close, how he decided he didn’t want to hear whatever was being mustered up—how he turned and walked away, blue eyes watching him go.

_He didn’t have any real friends_ , but maybe he could have, if Steve had only listened to what he had to say.

Steve doesn’t know he’s crying until he’s shaking with it, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. He wants to claw through the dirt until he reaches the coffin, wants to rip it open and see blue eyes—it was just a sick joke, all of this, see? He was just _asleep_ —so he can get one more chance to make it right, so “I’m sorry” doesn’t have to be the last thing he’ll ever hear from the boy he turned his back on. 

He feels sick when he realizes that nothing will ever grow out of this mound of dirt with its cheap, bare headstone.

Eleven had told them, quiet and slow outside the Starcourt Mall, about what she’d seen, his mom and his dad and his tears dripping down his nose onto her cheeks as he came back to himself. Her voice had been raw with grief, even before Joyce Byers came staggering out, sobbing into Will’s shoulder, and Eleven lost the only family she’d ever had. Her grief then had been reserved for the little boy she’d seen forever lost on a stormy beach, for the broken boy who lay dead on the ground after saving all of them—saving the whole goddamn world.

Steve can’t understand why some people’s lives are just _bad_. He can’t understand how a little boy could be abandoned and hurt by the two people who are supposed to love him the most, how a father could beat his son until nothing is left but anger and bitterness and poison, until he forgets how it feels to be loved. 

Steve doesn’t understand how life could be so relentlessly cruel to someone, right up until the very end.

This isn’t his fault, he knows, but some things are. And he wishes so desperately that the strangled “I’m sorry” didn’t come just before death did because—

Because _he’s_ sorry. And he’ll never get to say it now, at least not in a way that will matter. Not in a way that will ever be heard. But he says it anyways, says it to the name etched into the headstone, says it like a plea, says it like he’ll get an answer.

Steve shuts his eyes. “I’m sorry.” He opens them again.

The headstone is still bare.

The cemetery is still empty.

Steve looks down at the clods of dirt covering the last place Billy Hargrove will ever be and still doesn’t know why he’s here.

So he leaves, turning his back on blue eyes he’ll never see again. The ugly thing churning in his gut grows and grows until he feels it in his bones. He knows what it is, then, is heavy with the weight of it. 

Grief.

He hates himself for feeling it, because they weren’t anything to each other, because he doesn’t deserve to mourn someone he had written off and turned his back on, time and time again. Steve doesn’t get to _miss him,_ not when he didn’t even _try_ to learn anything about him, didn’t even _care,_ until it was too late.

But he does. And he feels like he’s cracking in half as he gets in his car and drives away. 

***

Max shows up at his house a few days later. He doesn’t hear her footsteps, just looks up and she’s there, standing over him, her eyes rimmed red.

Steve shifts, pushes himself up on the lounge chair, wipes a bead of sweat from his temple. The August heat is stifling, even this early in the morning, but lately he’s started sitting out by the spot where Barb died, when he first learned what it was like to lose someone and be partly responsible. He sits out there, and he watches the water, and he watches the trees, and he wonders why even when he tries to be better, he still does the wrong thing.

“I knocked,” Max says. 

“Sorry,” Steve answers, and he’s talking about how he was sitting out by the pool and didn’t hear her, but. _Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry your brother’s dead, I’m sorry I didn’t listen to what he tried to tell me back in January, I’m sorry, I’m so fucking_ —“sorry.” He says it again. Just because he can.

He scoots over and Max sits next to him, clutching a plastic bag. She looks small and wrung out, wearing a too-big T-shirt that Steve thinks belonged to someone else.

He doesn’t want to think about who.

Even Max's hair seems duller, like some of the color seeped out and spilled onto the floor of the mall that night, red like the blood wasn’t.

“Um,” she starts, hunching in on herself. Steve has the strangest urge to wrap his arms around her. “His dad threw everything out, but I found this, and I thought you might want it back.”

Steve is trying not to think about what “threw everything out” means, for a father to empty a room full of his son’s belongings less than a month after he died choking out an apology, choking on his own blood, but then—

“Wait, what? Want it _back?_ ”

Max wordlessly offers him the plastic bag. Steve has no idea what could possibly have been in that room that once belonged to him, so he opens it, pulls out something soft, and stares at it for a long time.

It’s his sweatshirt. Steve doesn’t understand. He thought he’d lost it, left it in the locker room one day after basketball and it had been gone the next day.

But now he’s holding it, and his name is written in sharpie on the tag, and Steve _doesn’t understand_.

“I didn’t know you were friends,” Max whispers. “I didn’t think—” 

_He didn’t have any real friends._

“We weren’t.” Steve’s throat aches when the words come out. “I don’t know why he had this.”

Max heaves then, an awful noise that sounds a lot like a sob, like she’d half expected Steve to say that they were, like she _needed_ Steve to say that they were, to tell her something _good_ , to give her some warm memory to cling to. She wraps her arms around herself like she’s trying to squeeze herself back together and seems so, so young. 

Steve doesn’t know what to do. He presses his shoulder against hers, lets her slump against him, thinks that when it comes down to it, when it really matters, he never knows how to help. 

After a while, Max stands up, tells him she’s going home.

Steve watches her walk away, imagines her going home and sitting in an empty room that used to belong to a boy Steve could have helped but didn’t. He decides then that if he can never make it right with one of them, at least he can make it right with the other. So—

“Max, wait!” He calls, jogging after her. She turns, and Steve thinks about all the things he wants to say but doesn’t know how. He’s never been good with words and anyways, how do you tell someone you’re sorry for something you’re not even sure would have made a difference? 

“Come back,” he says, instead. “When you miss him, when you start to think about that night—” he swallows, “just come here, yeah?”

“Why?” She sounds uncertain.

“ _Because_. I could have been there for him once, and I wasn’t. I _chose_ not to be.” Steve’s eyes burn. He’s never said that out loud. “But maybe I could be there for you. If you wanted.”

Max doesn’t do anything—doesn’t even move—until, just barely, she nods. And then, before Steve understands what’s happening, her arms are tight around his waist, her face hidden in his shirt. 

The two of them just stand there, Max clutching onto Steve like he’s the only thing keeping her upright, both drowning in grief for someone they hadn’t known they’d mourn, someone they hadn’t understood until it was too late.

When she finally leaves, Steve pulls his shirt off, unzips his shorts, and does something he thought he’d never do again.

He jumps into the pool, _his_ pool where Barb died, and blows air out of his lungs until he sinks to the bottom.

Later, when it’s dark outside and he’s in his room, he takes the sweatshirt out of the bag again.

Steve doesn’t know why anyone would want to steal his sweatshirt, let alone— 

He clutches it in his hands and doesn’t understand until he does. And Steve’s stupid, he knows this, but when he thinks about it, _really_ thinks about it, the looks he resolutely ignored, the golden skin pressed up against his back in basketball practice, always so warm and always guarding _him_ , when he thinks about how he learned in first grade that pulling Katie Thompson’s pigtails until she cried wasn’t the right way to get her to notice him, but that not everyone learns the right way to tell someone you like them, that “pretty boy” could mean more than mockery, that it could just mean _pretty_ —when Steve finally understands, bile rises to the back of his throat and he dry heaves into the trashcan next to his bed.

He’s so, so tired.

Steve crawls into bed and turns the light off, alone in the dark emptiness of his room.

Feeling cold in more ways than one, Steve pulls the sweatshirt over his head. It smells like stale cigarette smoke and cheap cologne. It’s that, more than anything, that breaks him. He cries until he feels dried up, until he feels hollow. 

*** 

_September 18th, 1985_

Steve knows why he’s here this time.

The headstone looks beautiful, still bare but drenched in sunlight. Steve thinks he’d like that.

He’ll never get to say he’s sorry, but he’s figured out that there are other ways to make things right.

This grave feels like a good place to start—showing that the person buried here _mattered_ , and still does, the beautiful boy with blue eyes who forgot how it felt to be loved, who pulled Steve’s pigtails and stole his sweatshirt, who died saving the world.

Steve knows why he’s here, but he doesn’t think this is the last place Billy Hargrove will ever be, not anymore. He thinks Billy is somewhere else. Somewhere better.

He kneels.

Pulling a packet of seeds out of his pocket, he pushes each one carefully into the dirt and sprinkles water over the grave when he stands.

Steve brushes off his jeans and wonders if maybe it started with Max—who he has dinner with every Wednesday now—that maybe by making things right with Max, he was making things right with Billy, too.

He looks down at the dirt and thinks that soon, Billy’s grave will be covered in California poppies—soon, something good will grow.

Steve leaves a pack of Marlboro Reds on the headstone when he goes.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I'm on [tumblr](https://inkyreveries.tumblr.com/)


End file.
